More Payroll

When you come to me and say, "I got good service but you need more people working." What do you expect me to say back?

"Oh, you don't think having one person working when we expect over 1000 people to walk through the door today is enough!? Wow, that's great feedback. I'm not very smart so I totally thought it was fine but thank you for letting me know, you clearly know how to do my job better than me."

Do you think that we only have one person working because we think it's enough? Because we scheduled everyone to work Monday morning at 8am and now don't have any more hours? Because we don't have staff who are desperate for more hours?

We only have one person working on the floor because corporate has decided that's enough. Somebody in an office on the other side of the country decides how many hours a week our store is allowed to use (payroll). How much payroll we can use is based on how much we sell:

for every $1000 we sell we get 3 hours of payroll. Our shifts are 4.5 hours long so each person who works has to sell $1500 to pay for themselves.

Doesn't seem so bad, right? Well keep in mind that we have to schedule people outside of store hours to receive shipment and replenish the floor. We have to do markdowns and make moves to allow for new product, put up signage for promotions and sales, change mannequins outfits, change windows, make schedules, hire people and train them, vaccuum, clean toilets, and dust, fold and size everything perfectly, open and close cash, among many other things that don't happen on a weekly basis. When you add all of these items in it works out to be more like $5000 a person.

My store gets about 900 hours of payroll a week. To truly run our store properly (ie to be able to have enough cashiers, enough sales associates, enough fitting room/runners, enough managers working just while we're open) we would need about 1400 a week. I only get 1400 a week at Christmas when I'm also making $400 000 a week and in fact need 2000 hours!

When the recession hit payroll was one of the first things to go. We were expected to do more with less, to help five customers at once while folding down the store and ringing people out. When the economy got better the company said, "hey, look at how well they coped with no payroll, we don't need to give it back."

So don't insult a retail employee by telling them the store needs more people working. We know we need more people and we want there to be more people way more than you do. If you actually want it to change you need to call the customer service number or email the company directly. If enough people do this they may start investing in the stores again. Telling us is pointless. Corporate doesn't listen to what we have to say and considers it all just whining. You need to give the feedback directly and you need to give it often.

And when you are in the store, instead of telling us we need more people, why not instead say, "wow, it must be really hard to work somewhere that's clearly underfunded but man do you guys work hard and do the best you can."